Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia

by William Gilmore Simms

But Bunce was not a man easily frightened. As he phrased it himself, he had been quite too long knocking about among men to be scared by shadows, and replied stoutly—though really with some internal misgivings—to the lachrymalities of the learned counsel. He gave him to understand that, if he got into difficulty, he knew some other persons whom his confessions would make uncomfortable; and hinted pretty directly at certain practices of a certain professional gentleman, which, though the pedler knew nothing of the technical significant might yet come under the head of barratry, and so forth.

The lawyer was the more timid man of the two, and found it necessary to pare down his potency. He soon found it profitable to let the matter rest, and having made arrangements with the pedler for bringing suit for damages against two of the neighboring farmers concerned in the demolition of his wares—who, happening to be less guilty than their accessaries, had ventured to remain in the country—Bunce found no difficulty in making his way out of the prison. There had been no right originally to detain him; but the consciousness of guilt, and some other ugly misgivings, had so relaxed the nerves of the tradesman, that he had never thought to inquire if his name were included in the warrant of arrest. It is probable that his courage and confidence would have been far less than they appear at present, had not Pippin assured him that the regulators were no longer to be feared; that the judge had arrived; that the grand-jury had found bills against several of the offenders, and were still engaged in their labors; that a detachment of the state military had been ordered to the station; and that things looked as civil as it was altogether possible for such warlike exhibition to allow. It is surprising to think how fearlessly uncompromising was the conduct of Bunce under this new condition of affairs.

But the pedler, in his own release from custody, was not forgetful of his less-fortunate companion. He was a frequent visiter in the dungeon of Ralph Colleton; bore all messages between the prisoner and his counsel; and contributed, by his shrewd knowledge of human kind, not a little to the material out of which his defence was to be made.

He suggested the suspicion, never before entertained by the youth, or entertained for a moment only, that his present arrest was the result of a scheme purposely laid with a reference to this end; and did not scruple to charge upon Rivers the entire management of the matter.

Ralph could only narrate what he knew of the malignant hatred of the outlaw to himself—another fact which none but Lucy Munro could establish. Her evidence, however, would only prove Rivers to have meditated one crime; it would not free him from the imputation of having committed another. Still, so much was important, and casualties were to be relied upon for the rest.

But what was the horror of all parties when it was known that neither Lucy nor any of the landlord's family were to be found! The process of subpoena was returned, and the general opinion was, that alarmed at the approach of the military in such force, and confident that his agency in the late transactions could not long remain concealed in the possession of so many, though guilty like himself, Munro had fled to the west.

The mental agony of the youth, when thus informed, can not well he conceived. He was, for a time, utterly prostrate, and gave himself up to despair. The entreaties of the pedler, and the counsels and exhortings of the lawyer, failed equally to enliven him; and they had almost come to adopt his gloomy resignation, when, as he sat on his low bench, with head drooping on his hand, a solitary glance of sunshine fell through the barred window—the only one assigned to his cell.

The smile of God himself that solitary ray appeared to the diseased spirit of the youth, and he grew strong in an instant. Talk of the lessons of the learned, and the reasonings of the sage!—a vagrant breeze, a rippling water, a glance of the sweet sunlight, have more of consolation in them for the sad heart than all the pleadings of philosophy. They bring the missives of a higher teacher.

Bunce was an active coadjutor with the lawyer in this melancholy case. He made all inquiries—he went everywhere. He searched in all places, and spared no labor; but at length despaired. Nothing could be elicited by his inquiries, and he ceased to hope himself, and ceased to persuade Ralph into hope. The lawyer shook his head in reply to all questions, and put on a look of mystery which is the safety-valve to all swollen pretenders.

In this state of affairs, taking the horse of the youth, with a last effort at discoveries, Bunce rode forth into the surrounding country. He had heretofore taken all the common routes, to which, in his previous intercourse with the people, he had been accustomed; he now determined to strike into a path scarcely perceptible, and one which he never remembered to have seen before. He followed, mile after mile, its sinuosities. It was a wild, and, seemingly, an untrodden region. The hills shot up jaggedly from the plain around him—the fissures were rude and steep—more like embrasures, blown out by sudden power from the solid rock. Where the forest appeared, it was dense and intricate—abounding in brush and underwood; where it was deficient, the blasted heath chosen by the witches in Macbeth would have been no unfit similitude.